Digitally-based and film-based cameras abound and are extremely flexible and convenient. One use for a camera is in the taking of self portraits. Typically, the user frames the shot and places the camera in a mode whereby when the shutter button is depressed; the camera waits a predetermined time so that the user may incorporate himself back into the shot before the camera actually takes the picture. This is cumbersome and leads to nontrivial problems. Sometimes the predetermined delay time is not long enough. Other times, it may be too long. For participates who are in place and ready to have their picture taken, especially children, waiting with a smile on their face for the picture to be snapped by the camera can seem endless even if it is just a few seconds long. Additionally, many who might like to be included into a shot find themselves not able to be because they have to take the picture and it is simply too much trouble to set up for a shutter-delayed photograph.
Voice recognition techniques are well known in the art and have been applied to cameras, see for example, U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,951,079, 6,021,278 and 6,101,338 which are herein incorporated by reference. It is currently possible to have fairly large vocabularies of uttered words recognized by electronic device. Speech recognition devices can be of a type whereby they are trained to recognize a specific person's vocalizations, so called speaker dependent recognition, or can be of a type which recognizes spoken words without regard to who speaks them, so called speaker independent recognition. Prior art voice operated cameras have several defects remedied or improved upon by various aspects of the present invention more fully disclosed below. One such problem is that in self portrait mode, the camera may snap the picture while the user is uttering the command. Another defect is that the microphone coupled to the voice recognition unit is usually mounted on the back of the camera. This placement is non-optimal when the user is in front of the camera as when taking a self portrait. Still another problem with prior art voice activated cameras is that they associate one vocalization or utterance to one camera operation. Thus, the user must remember which command word is to be spoken for which camera operation. This is overly constraining, unnatural, and significantly reduces the utility of adding voice recognition to the camera.
One prior art implementation of voice recognition allows for menu driven prompts to help guide the user through the task of remembering which command to speak for which camera function. This method however requires that the user be looking at the camera's dedicated LCD display for the menu. One aspect of the present invention provides for the menus to be displayed in the electronic view finder of the camera and be manipulated with both voice and gaze. Another aspect of the present invention incorporates touchpad technology which is typically used in laptop computers, such technology being well know in the art, as the camera input device for at least some functions.